Time to tell spies we, the people, not the enemies

Updated 4:31 pm, Monday, March 17, 2014

Sen. Dianne Feinstein is angry about the CIA's supposed destruction of evidence.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein is angry about the CIA's supposed destruction of evidence.

Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press

Time to tell spies we, the people, not the enemies

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

We now have even more proof that our burgeoning intelligence agencies, which were given unprecedented latitude to wage war against terrorists, are dangerously out of control.

Not that further evidence was needed: Months of stunning revelations about the National Security Agency's massive domestic surveillance, thanks to fugitive whistle-blower Edward Snowden, should have been more than enough. But last week, one of the intelligence community's staunchest defenders in Congress took to the Senate floor to announce that even she has had it up to here.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who heads the Senate intelligence committee, trained her fury on the CIA, which has waged a five-year campaign of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare to keep the committee from doing a crucial job: fully investigating the torture, secret detention and other appalling excesses committed under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Feinstein accused the CIA of improperly searching computers that intelligence committee staff members were using to review CIA documents about “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding.

“I have grave concerns that the CIA's search may well have violated the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution,” Feinstein said. She said she believes the agency might also have violated the Fourth Amendment, a federal law and a presidential executive order.

Agencies whose mandate is to operate in the shadows, such as the CIA and the NSA, obviously cannot announce or acknowledge most of their actions. The only way we can be assured that the spooks are not running amok is through civilian oversight. President Obama took immediate measures at the beginning of his first term to outlaw torture, secret overseas detention and other outrages sanctioned by Bush and Cheney. But Obama decided to take a forward-looking approach — and showed no enthusiasm, for a comprehensive public accounting of past excesses.

Feinstein's committee properly decided that the torture and harsh detention had been egregious enough to warrant “an expansive and full review.” The CIA had already destroyed the only video recordings of its waterboarding sessions, emails, memos and other documents that the committee wanted to examine, Feinstein said.

Obama's first CIA director, Leon Panetta, insisted that the committee's staff examine the documents — after they had been redacted — at a secure location in Virginia. Feinstein alleges that the CIA improperly searched the committee's computers at this secure site. Files on those computers, she charges, have, oddly, disappeared.

The CIA's current director, John Brennan, flatly denied that the agency did anything improper. In a letter to Feinstein, he alleged that it was the committee's investigators who acted improperly by obtaining a file that the agency never intended to surrender — a detailed index that cast the agency in a particularly bad light.

Step back and take a wider view. A committee of the U.S. Senate, working on your behalf and mine, has been trying for five years to perform its duty of civilian oversight of the intelligence agencies. Despite the CIA's best efforts, the committee has put together a 6,000-page draft report — but the CIA is fighting its release. The top-secret document that the CIA seems most determined to hide is not some dossier on al-Qaida, but an index of the agency's excesses and failures.

Now take another step back. Look at how the CIA's role has expanded to include what most of us would consider military operations, including flying and firing armed drones. Look at the revelations about the NSA's collection of phone-call data. Look at how the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has stretched the Fourth Amendment and the Patriot Act beyond all recognition.

We should want the CIA to be capable of ruthlessness when necessary. But then it is our duty to haul the spooks back into line when they go too far. This is a very big deal.